Research Areas

Teaching Areas

Faculty & School/Dept.

Faculty of Health - Department of Psychology

Degrees

PhD - 2006University Of Toronto

BA - 2001King's College/Dalhousie

Biography

Michael Pettit studies the history and public understanding of science.

His first book The Science of Deception (2013) offered a novel interpretation of the cultural origins of psychology by looking at the discipline's place in the history of capitalism. The book charts the captivation with the practices of deception running through turn-of-twentieth-century American religious, legal, and commercial culture. It addresses how optical illusion crossed between laboratory instruments and amusements in mass culture, the role of psychology in laws regulating the advertising and labeling of food and drugs, the debunking of spirit mediums, pathological lying as a psychiatric diagnosis, the role of the lie detector in policing, and the rise of personality testing.

His second book, The Sex Lives of Animals in the Age of Kinsey, is nearing completion. During the 1940s and 1950s a number of prominent American scientists championed the importance of non-procreative behaviors in understanding both human and animal sexuality. This liberal sexology informed much of the self-help literature and social policy of the sexual revolution. In the 1970s, newly organized feminist, LGBT, and animal liberation movements intervened to alter the core assumptions and practices of this behavioral endocrinology. The book draws on archival documents to trace how individual readers, patients, and activist organizations sought in turn, to engage, debunk, and incorporate this research into hormones and animal behavior into their own identities.

His latest project is a general history of psychology since the 1960s.

He also has an reflexive interest in research methods, examining the history of psychology's ethics and methods while developing new digital and qualitative tools for conducting historical research. Much of this work is done in collaboration with members of the PsyBorgs Digital History of Psychology Lab.